Get More Beauty For Your Buck With Self-Acceptance

We know beauty's only skin deep, so why do our self-esteem and wallets still feel the pinch?

With almost 20 million views in the first week of their new music videos, John Legend and Colbie Caillat are hitting a collective nerve. Legend's You and I and Colbie Caillat’s Try shake you up, question your values and toss you out of your comfort zone. Both address self-love and acceptance with views of real life in all its shapes, sizes and idiosyncrasies. Both bring you to tears, if not to gut-wrenching sobs, and ask you to dig deep to get to what's really important.

Sentimental? Of course, but don't toss them aside too quickly. They're more than just sentimentality. While both videos address acceptance at the personal realm, the other goes a bit further, a bit deeper into what else is behind the issue. Callat’s video takes you beyond personal responsibility into a systemic problem behind it all: the world's obsessive compulsive consumerism.

Follow the words in the second verse of Caillait's Try and you find the subtle shift from a personal issue to global issue:

"Get your shopping on, at the mall, max your credit cardsYou don't have to choose, buy it all, so they like youDo they like you?"

The beauty and diet industry are one of the greatest contributors to financial distress in our world. Lucintel, a market research and consulting firm predicts the global beauty market will reach $265 billion by 2017 while global weight loss programs are expected to reach $47 billion by 2015 according to Global Industry Analysts. That's a whole lot of buying getting in the way of self-love and acceptance. Add to that judgment from experts and others for any resultant financial irresponsibility, and self-loathing — not self-love — becomes the natural by-product.

That's why this problem is greater than you and I and must be dealt with both internally and externally. You can't just shift your personal viewpoint or correct your faulty thinking. Thinking "I know better" or "I should change" or "I'm so irresponsible" takes you out of self-love and ignores all the external pressures that contribute to the problem. External messages push you down the slippery slope of "keeping up with the Jones's" into the bottomless pit of financial mismanagement until you believe you need more, more, more because you"ll never be enough until you have it all. Unfortunately, these messages are everywhere and are so relentless that by now you're mostly unconscious of the messages and their financial consequences.

The solution is turning up the volume on the external issues to balance the awareness of the internal with the external. Only by doing both will you create a firm, financial foundation for fostering self-love and acceptance.